Con Nicolopoulos Helping Engineer Recovery Efforts

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought motorsports – all sports – to a temporary halt. There have been lots of little silver linings to be found inside the dark cloud that has seen most of the world shelter in place for the last two months. T

Another of the silver linings is the resolve of the motorsports community to help those in need.

Numerous race shops and suppliers have stayed busy, retooling their production from racing products to personal protective equipment for medical professionals involved in fighting the coronavirus.

Con Nicolopoulos is not one that normally receives a lot of attention during a typical ARCA Menards Series race weekend. Nicolopoulos, an electrical engineer at Chrysler by day, drives the No. 0 GreatRailing.com Chevrolet for Wayne Peterson Racing on a limited basis, and does so with a very limited budget.

The 58-year-old from Columbus, Michigan, has 81 career starts since 2011.

He matched his career high with a 14th-place finish in the Lucas Oil 200 Driven by General Tire on Feb. 8, and his effort – in a car that arrived at the race track on an open trailer – was heralded by FOX Sports’ Mike Joy and Jeff Gordon during the Busch Clash telecast.

RACING-REFERENCE: Con Nicolopoulos Career Statistics

With the world on a temporary hold, and the auto manufacturers having some excess capacity to reallocate resources, Nicolopoulos and his group have joined in recovery efforts.

“FCA (Fiat Chrysler Automobiles) has been working with two health care equipment manufacturers on ventilators, hospital beds, electronic thermometers, health monitors, and ultrasound equipment,” he said. “These manufacturers need to increase their production to meet the market demands due to the virus situation.Increasing production is a significant undertaking as it requires additional components (for each device), manpower, and manufacturing equipment. Our scope of work to date has been providing support to increase that production.”

“There teams from FCA that are assisting with stamping metal parts for hospital beds, assisting with securing additional manpower to assemble equipment and manufacturer assembly fixtures, and procuring parts to be able to meet the increased volumes.”

Nicolopoulos has direct involvement in identifying needed equipment and procuring the parts needed to build that equipment, which can be a huge challenge when much of the worldwide manufacturing capability has slowed due to the pandemic.

“We are reviewing all the hundreds of parts, making contact with the individual part distributors to check on availability of the parts in order to procure the quantities required to increase the production of the medical devices,” he said. “Where there are not enough parts available worldwide, my team is reviewing the technical specifications of each part and identifying suitable replacements.

It has been a challenge. Many of the components that go into these devices are manufactured worldwide, and just like with companies in the U.S. that have shut down, so have the manufacturers of these components have shut down as well, so you can see how challenging it is to not only to be able to get the parts needed, but also find suitable replacement parts.”

Much like the rest of the world, even though the victories may be small in nature at the moment, they are victories nonetheless.

“Although it has been challenging, we are making progress.”